Blade center architecture is an evolving technology that conveniently packages a processing system on a single board called a processing blade and houses a plurality of similar processing blades in a chassis. The processing blades can be easily installed or removed as desired and share common resources, such as input/output (“I/O”) ports, I/O media, one or more network connections, and the like. The ease with which the processing power of the blade center can be scaled by adding or removing processing blades is a key feature driving the development and use of blade center technology. This scalable feature makes blade centers ideal candidates for performing tasks such as data and webpage hosting.
Processing blades typically are complete processing systems including a processor, firmware, system memory, one or more hard disks, a network interface card (“NIC”), and the like. Current processing blades are left to themselves to power on, self-diagnose, and reset via a policy called Fault Resilient Booting (“FRB”), if the boot process fails. However, in some scenarios the individual processing blade may be incapable of self-reset or recovery. Some blade centers include a management module to coordinate and manage the operation of the individual processing blades. However, these blade centers are particularly vulnerable to a failure of the management module, which may result in the entire blade center ceasing to function.